Young Men and Fire (18 page)

It is harder to guess ahead of time how you will be received by those in charge of government documents than to guess what you will find in them. Ahead of time, I had guessed I would be sized up as a suspicious character up to no good: I was alone and peeking into government files and into Mann Gulch itself, which long since had been put out of sight and was better that way. Although Forest Service employees, I figured, would always be watching me with a fishy eye when I was around and even more so when I wasn’t, there were not nearly as many spies as I had expected. They were mostly old-timers, and some of them had worked in the office long enough to know that some funny PR business had gone on at the time of the Mann Gulch fire. Most of the Forest Service employees who had a corner of an eye on me belonged to that element in most PR offices who are never important enough to be trusted with any of the organization’s real secrets—they just know genetically that big organizations have shady secrets (that’s why they are big). Also genetically they like shady secrets and genetically they like to protect shady secrets but have none of their own. I gather that government organizations nearly always have this unorganized minority of Keepers of Unkept Secrets, and one of these, I was told, went so far as to write a letter to be read at a meeting of the staff of the regional forester reporting that I was making suspicious visits to Mann Gulch and reportedly and suspiciously arranging to bring back with me to Mann Gulch the two survivors of the fire. According to my source of information, after the letter was read the regional forester went right on with the business at hand as if nothing had interrupted him. And as far as I know, nothing had.

On the other hand, many of the men in the Forest Service
whose main job is fire control are unhistorical for fairly good reasons. There have been millions of forest fires in the past; the Indians even set them in the autumn to improve the pasture next spring. What firefighters want to know is the fire danger rating for today, and as for me, I am not as important to them as the fuel moisture content for that afternoon. They are tough guys and I like them and get along with them, although I am careful about telling them stories of the olden days when at times it took a week or more to assemble a crew in Butte, transfer them to the end of the branch railroad line going up the Bitterroot, and then walk them forty or fifty miles across the Bitterroot divide to get them to a fire on the Selway River in Idaho. I tried to be careful and meek and not end any such stories with a general observation such as “Fires got very big then and were hard to fight.” Firefighters prefer to believe that no one before them has ever been on a big fire.

Although it took more years than I had expected to get the information I wanted about the Mann Gulch fire, I know of only a very few instances where my difficulties were consciously made more difficult. To reassemble what was left of this fire, I needed the help of many more present members of the Forest Service than I can acknowledge in the course of this story, women as well as men. You must always remember the women, even if you are pursuing a forest fire, especially if you are pursuing it in a big institution. The new age for women had not yet worked its way through the walls of the Forest Service; still maybe it had a little. The women I worked with were in charge of the documents, the maps, and the photographs, and without them there would have been practically no illustrations in this book, or, for that matter, practically nothing to illustrate. Their attitude toward me was possibly a combination of women’s traditional attitude toward men touched by an added breath of confidence in themselves coming from the new. They were certainly good and they knew it. When I entered their offices, whether in Washington or Missoula, they looked up and seemed to say, fusing two worlds, “Here’s a man with a problem. What can we do to help him?”

Since I started to write this story I have seen women start taking over some of the toughest jobs in the Forest Service. I didn’t believe I would ever see it, but now there are even a few women Smokejumpers. I can bear witness. One of them lives just a few blocks from me in Chicago. Her father is a faculty member of the University of Chicago—he is a distinguished statistician and one of the best amateur actors I have ever seen. She is a remarkable young woman—attractive, brainy, and tough. They tell me at the Missoula base for Smokejumpers where she is stationed that she is up there with the rest of her crew (which means men) in the training races run in full jumping gear or hard-hat equipment.

Several times in this story of the Mann Gulch fire I have tried to find places where it would be permissible to say that the story of finding the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire has been different from the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire. Tragedy is the most demanding of all literary forms. Tragedy never lets you get far away from tragedy, but I do not want you to think I spent ten years in sustained pain writing what I wanted to write about the Mann Gulch fire. A lot of good things happened along the way. Some things got better, and I met a lot of good people, some of them as good as they come.

It’s hard to say when the pleasures and pains of writing start and end. They certainly start before writing does, and they seem to continue for some time afterwards. I met Bud Moore before I started to write, and he has become one of my closest friends. He and I soon discovered that both of us had worked in the Lochsa when we were boys and when the Lochsa was thought to be accessible only to the best men in the woods. Lewis and Clark had nearly starved there. Running into somebody who has worked in the Lochsa in the early part of the century is something like running into a buddy of yours who served on the battleship
Missouri
in World War II at the time General MacArthur was on it. Those of us who worked on the Lochsa early in this century regard ourselves as set apart from other woodsmen and our other countrymen in general.

I had started writing this story before I met Laird Robinson, but was still heavy in research and was wandering around the Smokejumper base looking for any odd items I might have overlooked. Laird had been a foreman in the Smokejumpers and had injured himself landing on a fire and twice had tried a comeback but finally had to accept he was through as a jumper. He had been made a temporary guide at the Smoke-jumper base until they got him placed in a line of work that would lead him toward the top. He was in his early thirties and in the woods could do anything, and among other things he wanted to know more about the Mann Gulch fire. He put a high premium on friendship, and we soon were close friends and doing a lot of our digging into Mann Gulch together, as you will see from the course of this story. It is a great privilege to possess the friendship of a young man who is as good or better than you at what you intended to be when you were his age just before you changed directions—all the way from the woods to the classroom. It is as if old age fortuitously had enriched your life by letting you live two lives, the life you finally chose to live and a working copy of the one you started out to live.

I tried to be careful that our friendship did not endanger Laird professionally, and there were times when it seemed that it might. We were well along in our investigations when evidence appeared suggesting that Rumsey and Sallee had been persuaded by the Forest Service’s investigator to change their testimony regarding the course of the fire at its critical stage. Persuading a witness to change his testimony to what he did not believe to be true was to me a lot more serious charge than scattering or burying documents that might bear on the threat of a lawsuit. So when I knew that I would have to try to find this investigator if he was still alive, I told Laird, “If you don’t like the way this thing is headed now, just step off it before you get hurt. I can see it might hurt you, but there’s no bravery in it for me because it can’t hurt me.”

Laird said to me, “Forget it. On my private list, friendship
is highest.” He said, “Anyway don’t worry about me. The Forest Service and I can take care of ourselves.”

So one of the pleasures of writing this story has been listening to the talk of first-class woodsmen, some old and some young.

F
OR A LONG TIME
, our story becomes the story of trying to find it, and like most stories of the woods this one must begin with the ground and with some questions to tell in which direction to look (since compasses only tell the directions, not which one to follow). To woodsmen, if you don’t know the ground you are probably wrong about nearly everything else. To woodsmen, the ground often furnishes most of the questions and a good number of the answers, and, if you don’t believe this, you and your story will most of the time be lost. A good woodsman who also was a fairly good storyteller would probably take only one good look at the crosses on the hill before the hill would be asking him, Why didn’t the rest of the crew, after leaving their foreman behind, follow Rumsey and Sallee to the top of the ridge instead of taking off on a sidehill angle that was twice the distance the survivors needed to reach safety? Twice the distance on the ground says it doesn’t make sense, and when something doesn’t make sense to the ground the mind should be left with a question.

To try to keep up with Rumsey and Sallee is also to hear the ground ask questions all the time, and one in particular on which the story and eight lawsuits depend: Are Rumsey and Sallee going straight for the top, or is Dodge’s fire driving them upgulch and so could be the fire that prevented the sidehilling crew below from escaping, as Thol Senior was to charge? If Rumsey and Sallee ran alongside Dodge’s fire straight to the top, another question follows: How could this
“escape fire” burn straight up the slope and across the path of the main fire, which was being driven upgulch by a strong wind? Finally, the crevice itself through which Rumsey and Sallee crawled to safety forever asks its big question: What did Diettert see in me or the ground beyond that he did not like and so did not crawl through me to safety? Without this question the story of the Mann Gulch fire would lose one of its most moving parts. Diettert was a fine jumper and a young scientist with unusual promise; yet he chose not to go through the crevice and died about 275 yards from where he left Rumsey and Sallee.

When Laird and I first started investigating these questions, we assumed as almost self-evident that a few moments after the survivors crawled through the crevice, a fire must have pushed upgulch and closed it, and that for a fatal distance beyond there must have been no other opening in the reef. We had been trying to remember the reef directly above the crosses as something like a Wall of China with only one breach in it through which the survivors escaped and, beyond that, an impregnable cliff. We should have known better, but such is the power of theory over rocks that it can make rocks into solid cliffs, which, however, when looked at close at hand, present openings wide enough to drive hay wagons through. On our 1977 trip to Mann Gulch, Laird had discovered that only occasionally was the reef solid enough to keep a fast climber from crawling through or over it.

Suddenly we felt the need for something we had needed for a long time without recognizing it—to get the two living survivors of the fire back into Mann Gulch with us. Suddenly we also realized that we probably didn’t know about a lot of things we thought we did but maybe only dead men knew. Survivors after nearly thirty years sound unreal enough to be dead, and, as far as we knew at the time, one or both of them might be. Nobody even at the Smokejumper base in Missoula knew whether they were legendary but alive or just burned-out flames burnished with legend.

W
E KNEW, OF COURSE
, that of the three survivors of the fire, Wag Dodge had died soon after (in 1955), but we had a hard time finding out whether Walter Rumsey and Robert Sallee had addresses on this earth. You will discover, if you ever try to find out about a mass tragedy, that people believe the few who survive die soon after it. There is always that strong mental connection between a first-class catastrophe and the “kiss of death,” and, in the case of the Mann Gulch fire, it seems there had been such a lasting kiss, since not only Dodge but the pilot, Kenneth Huber, were dead soon after the fire, as if they were also its victims. When I found that nobody at the Smokejumper base was sure whether Rumsey and Sallee were alive, I began to think of a poem by Sandburg about a “little fliv of a woman” who wrote a letter to God but it went to the Dead Letter Office, “where all letters go addressed to God and no house number.”

Fortunately, the basic tools of scholarship are much the same the world over, whether they are used under the ever-ready pigeons on the edge of the roof of the British Museum or in the presence of the white mountain goats that flit among the Gates of the Mountains. Wherever, you had better soon start looking for “first-hand sources” and, in order to discover what they are and where you can find them, you had better be good at “bibliography.” Scholars of the woods know that one of the best bibliographical reference works to consult is the postmistress of a nearby logging town. An ex-postmistress at my second home of Seeley Lake, Montana, who is a sort of yellow-pages directory of the loggers of the Northwest, told me she knew of a Sallee who was related to another Sallee and this other Sallee might be the Sallee I was looking for—if so, he was working in a sawmill west of Missoula toward French-town.

There is a Hoerner Waldorf-Champion paper mill out
there, and it was going full blast when I arrived. The outside, at least, looked just like the mills I had worked in when I was too young to work in a mill. I couldn’t find anybody in the offices, least of all in the personnel office, where there was a sign saying as always that they didn’t need any more help. Only one of all these offices was occupied; it said “The Nurse.” So the composition of a successful sawmill must still be the same as when I was first a millhand and was told I would never be an honest-to-God millhand until I lost a couple of fingers in the saws. The truth on which this ancient adage rests is that a sawmill is a large building full of moving chains, belts, and saws, all the chains and belts pulling toward saws, so if you or your clothes get caught in a chain or a belt, you know where you are going—you are going to the nurse. The composition, then, of a successful sawmill is a sign saying “No Help Wanted,” all the wanted help inside the big building working close to belts and saws, and the only office occupied by one nurse who can sew on fingers.

I felt encouraged. The nurse looked and sounded as if she were a French-Canadian from Frenchtown. She said, “What can I do for you?” and I replied, “Do you know whether a guy by the name of Sallee ever worked here?”

She asked, “Which Sallee? If you shake all the pine trees between here and Frenchtown—maybe between here and Superior—a lot of Sallees will drop out. Either a Sallee or a Des-champs or a LaCasse. What’s the name of your Sallee?”

I said, “Robert.”

“Isn’t that funny!” she said. “I have some friends by the name of Cyr who just got back from a vacation on the West Coast, and they stopped and visited Robert Sallee in Portland. If you’ll wait just a moment, I’ll telephone the Cyrs and get his address.”

So some lessons about the bibliography of the woods are fairly simple, such as the one about the postmistress. It is also simple if you are looking for a French-Canadian in the woods—all you have to do is find another one.

I flew to Portland to have a talk with Sallee, and he told me
that he was sure Rumsey was alive, although he hadn’t seen him in years. When he last saw Rumsey, he was in charge of some kind of soil conservation work and lived somewhere in the Southwest, but Sallee couldn’t remember where, although he thought he had the address at home. The address he later sent me was not in the Southwest but in Boise, Idaho, and a month or two later Rumsey answered me from Lincoln, Nebraska, where he and my letter had been transferred.

When first seen in person, the two survivors were unexpectedly real, and it is surprising to find that ghosts are real. They seemed big men for ghosts; both had become very successful in their professions, and it showed; both remained professional outdoorsmen, and that also showed. Sallee has stayed with timber and the mountains and works for Sandwell International, a consulting engineering firm. Rumsey returned to the plains from which he came and specialized in irrigation and soil conservation; he was to be killed in an airplane crash in 1981.

It didn’t take long after meeting them to discover they depended upon being curious. Among other things, they were curious about me. They couldn’t quite figure “what I was up to” and “what my game was,” and it took a winter of letter writing to make myself seem real to them and on the up-and-up. But it worked both ways. Laird and I were curious about them, as you would have been. I wanted to see them in the crack of the earth through which they had crossed from death. Since both of them had told me they had spent much of their afterlife trying to forget the fire that they alone could remember, I also became interested in seeing what they did and didn’t remember. I thought, just as an intellectual exercise, it would be interesting to observe what real ghosts remember of the death they did not die but those only seconds behind them did. And, of course, it would be moving to see two real ghosts together again who had been roommates in the first life and so had helped each other to a second life. I was not surprised to find that my chances of getting them back into Mann Gulch depended upon their being curious about
the same things I was, which they were. Out of curiosity, then, all four of us agreed to spend the day of July 1, 1978, in Mann Gulch.

The shortest possible version of the long story of finally getting together in Mann Gulch is that finally we did. Even this shortened version should include the detail that Laird’s boat wouldn’t work after he had dragged it over the Continental Divide from Missoula to Helena the evening before. But he remembered a hunting pal who lived twenty-nine miles out of Helena on the Missouri River and had a jet-propulsion boat, the kind that can be landed in shallow water, and you can bet there are no docks where we were going to land. At three o’clock in the morning, Laird returned to Helena with the borrowed boat. We gave him a couple of hours in bed before pushing the boat into the Missouri and heading for the Gates of the Mountains.

W
E LANDED THE BIG BOAT
at the mouth of Rescue Gulch, which must be among the earth’s special gulches to Rumsey and Sallee. When they crawled through the reef out of Mann Gulch, they crossed into Rescue Gulch, and it is near the head of Rescue Gulch that they found the rock slide in which they dodged from one side to the other as the main fire flapped by them. It is the head of this gulch that Hellman reached after the fire caught him crossing out of Mann Gulch, and it is up this gulch that Jansson and Sallee led the rescue crew the night of the fire and met Rumsey coming down trying to reach the Missouri at midnight for a canteen of water for Hellman.

Approaching Mann Gulch from Rescue Gulch is approaching Mann Gulch from the side, and Mann Gulch can’t be seen until you look down into it after reaching the top of the ridge. However, if you know where to look from the mouth of Rescue Gulch, you can see Hellman’s cross close to
the top. It is up this gulch that Jansson took Gisborne, and Jansson, having been head of the rescue crew, knew where Hellman’s cross was and from the mouth of Rescue Gulch pointed it out to Gisborne, who took two hours getting there, stopping every hundred yards by prior agreement. Probably it was because Gisborne died of a heart attack on the way out that the others with me insisted I not try to make the climb, being twenty years older than Gisborne was when he died and, like him, having had heart problems. They even said they had been told in Missoula not to let me go. Finally, I had to get personal and tell them, “Look, there is a mountain downriver no farther than twelve miles from here by air that also looks over the Missouri. It was named by my wife when she was still a girl, and she named it Mount Jessie after herself, although she lived an otherwise modest life. At her request her ashes are there now. Nobody should feel bad if I should remain behind on one of these hills that looks her way.” Sallee reached over and took my pack off my shoulders, and we started climbing.

He and Rumsey walked ahead toward the top of the hill. They seemed to get bigger instead of smaller as they climbed. Sallee, who at seventeen had been underage for the Smoke-jumpers, remained almost oversized. The afternoon I talked with him in Portland, in the board room of Sandwell International, he looked big just sitting there. He answered questions suddenly, especially if he didn’t like them. Almost as soon as we sat down, I asked, “Is it true you lied about your age to get into the Smokejumpers?” He never moved from his elbows. “Who told you that?” he asked. When I said, “Somebody from Frenchtown,” he said, “Yes.”

Not long afterwards I asked him how he accounted for the fact that he and Rumsey, the two youngest and most inexperienced members of the crew, were the only ones to survive. This brought him off his elbows. “What do you mean, the most inexperienced? What difference does it make that we were in our first year as Smokejumpers? Jumping had nothing to do
with what happened in Mann Gulch. Mann Gulch was nothing but a footrace with a fire. I was brought up in the backwoods in northern Idaho, where I had to go four miles each way to school, and I ran it. I was the best walker in every crew I worked on, and I made a point of showing I was, because it showed I wasn’t underage. Rumsey was from the plains and from a small town, and he was tough. We were roommates, and, if things didn’t go right, we saw that we never got far apart.”

Probably one reason Sallee has done so well in business is that he doesn’t fool around with questions. He himself attributed his position at Sandwell to his absolutely white hair. Probably both reasons are about the same.

Rumsey was a lanky Kansan and liked to have time to think and to remain in doubt about quite a few things, partly because, as a Kansan, he found it uneconomical, even dangerous, to think of too many things at once. He was the one who thought only of “the top of the ridge, the top of the ridge.”